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December 4, 2011

JJ Reviews: Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary

JJ Reviews: Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary

I was about a quarter of the way through doing my first Insane run through of Gears of War 3 when Halo Anniversary dropped and that hot little potatoe fell into my Xbox at the expense of arguably the year’s best game (don’t play war games, don’t get me started) and stayed there for a week or so as I played through a heroic version of the game that made the gaming industry what it is today. Or rather the played the newest version of the game!

Anyways on to the review - I should basically just repost this Halo CE review I did a couple of years ago. I said then:

“So while the game's graphics may look a little tired to modern day games such as Call of Duty and Mass Effect or even the new Final Fantasy, the game play still holds up. It's well paced, and has many neat combat scenarios to keep the player well entertained. At times the game can be infuriating - Floods with rocket launchers and annoying fire from Banshee ships can impede your progress, but getting through them proves the game's worth. I'm almost tempted to suggest that Bungie should have remade Halo: Combat Evolved instead of Reach but as the story has already been told, I'll sit and patiently play through the rest of the Halo series until Reach is safely in my Xbox 360's disk drive.”

This review should be of no surprise to any one reading this Halo blog – Halo Anniversary is a good fun thing. And prettier. You know how your memory tricks you? You might think that hair cut you had 10 years ago was the best hair cut you ever had but then you see a photo of yourself and you just look butt ugly? Well that’s how the old Halo looked. The new, prettier version is like some high class hooker or something. You are paying for the make believe of the memories of that haircut. If that makes sense…..

So basically that’s the review, Halo is still awesome. She’s just had a coat of new paint. But what a coat of paint!

There’s been a few attempts to utilise the power of the Xbox – Kinect has been integrated to allow you throw grenades and reload by way of voice command but frankly, it’s just gimmicky. The use of Kinect to full your own Library is just dullsville and I’m glad there was no achievement points associated with this tool!

The infamous Library level is still fun to play (I have no idea why there’s so much hate for it – is it because the casual player sux) – I noted there were some arrows in it to help you find your way.

I managed to find a couple of skulls and terminals without cheating which was a wee bit of a thrill cos I totally cheated with Halo 3’s skull recovery – here’s a cheat sheet for finding the CE skulls and here’s a guide for the Terminals. I found three terminals and they told a pretty cool story from the point of view of the character 343 Guilty Spark – I love the fact that he appeared to have left the Halo at some stage and gone on a ‘holiday’ to relive his boredom!